The Malik Report

“The simple truth is we wanted to bring the old horn over, and the old horn is a tiny little horn, believe it or not,” said Tom Wilson, president of Olympia Entertainment. “It just never was going to fill the volume we need.”

The so-called bowl portions of the two buildings are simply too different, he said.

“What we’ve got is, it’s probably triple the volume and totally different acoustics,” in Little Caesars Arena, Wilson said. “It would be more like a beep, you know? As opposed to what we’re used to. So, we just made the decision to tape the sound, which we did over the summer, and magnify it, so it would be as close to the sound that people remember.”

And so, at 5:20 of the second period in the 4-2 opening-night win against the Wild, when Martin Frk fired a shot off Anthony Mantha’s thigh, the puck plopped to the ice and Mantha ripped it in from point-blank range for the first Wings’ goal of all time in Little Caesars Arena, fans heard the amplified sound of the old goal horn, for the first time.

“You still have to handle it the old way,” Wilson said. “If you want it to sound for 10 seconds, you’ve got to hold the button down for 10 seconds. But it is a taped sound.”

It is no exaggerating to say the sound recording of the ghorn from JLA does not sound like the real ghorn in JLA.
Real goal horn is a sound sourced from one single point in the space of the arena. Recording, on the other hand, comes out simultaneously from many different speakers. It brings difference in how the sound echoes around, how it rebounds, how it gets absorbed by the interior.
Maybe after the season is over, they should experiment with different horns, with their position inside the arena, with the direction towards which the pipes are pointing to. LCA has more complicated shape than JLA. The resulting acoustics is more complicated too. But people experienced in acoustics should be able to figure out the obstacles and bring the real horn triggering the real visceral feeling.

About The Malik Report

The Malik Report is a destination for all things Red Wings-related. I offer biased, perhaps unprofessional-at-times and verbose coverage of my favorite team, their prospects and developmental affiliates. I've joined the Kukla's Korner family with five years of blogging under my belt, and I hope you'll find almost everything you need to follow your Red Wings at a place where all opinions are created equal and we're all friends, talking about hockey and the team we love to follow.